


Maskerad

by AnonLady



Series: Folksagor [2]
Category: Midsommar (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:53:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28706226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonLady/pseuds/AnonLady
Summary: Dani POV pure fairytale fluff wish-fulfillment AU beginning with 12-year-old Dani stuffing nine different wildflowers behind her pillow and making a desperate, lonely wish.
Relationships: Dani Ardor/Pelle (Midsommar)
Series: Folksagor [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2104272
Kudos: 41





	Maskerad

**Author's Note:**

> Swedish vocab:  
> Maskerad - Masquerade  
> Hallå sounds a lot like “hello.” If you heard it, you would not necessarily realize the other person wasn’t speaking English until they went on.  
> Jag lovar - I promise

Cross-legged in the back patio shade, Dani Ardor swishes back one page from “Must-Have Nail Polish Colors for Summer," to the 2-page spread on fortune-telling. At the bottom, beneath a photo of a bursting, lush flower crown, she plucks a last, essential detail, one they both almost overlooked. 

“Hey, Terri! It says nine _different_ wildflowers.”

Terri’s already wilting three dandelions in a chipped nail polish fist, squatting to harvest her fourth. She’s ten, still publicly uninterested in true love and resolute that her hatred of Mathlete rival Bryan Nixon has nothing to do with _liking_ him. But summer vacation days yawn so long in late July. At this point, Terri will do anything not to be bored. 

She squints back at Dani, too thick frames sliding down her nose. “Does that mean ones in mom’s flowerbed don’t count?”

Solemn consideration frowns on Dani, and she joins her sister, scrunching freckles, in the full sun. Twelve, secretly heartbroken that Ryan asked her to talk to Meghan on his behalf, just beginning to feel hampered by the invisible chrysalis of puberty swelling around her, Dani is always something lately, but it’s not bored.

There are easily nine kinds of flowers they could harvest from Mom’s little gravel-bordered beds, and that’s not including the dandelions or the pinkish buds studding the spooky purple spikes of the wandering jews, which Dani isn’t sure _counts_ as a flower. But no. That’s too easy.

“It says wildflowers.” Big sister makes her ruling. “We need something that grows by itself.” Saying it, Dani believes it. Nine different wildflowers, _wild_ flowers, growing all on their own, naturally, in _spite_ of people, not because of them. That feels like magic. That feels _right._

They quest as far as the woods by the jogging trail where they’re forbidden to go, but they go because they are together. It takes until the fireflies begin crying for each other with their light, but they manage and are home before dusk gives entirely over to night. So when each sister lays down in her room to sleep, she will have a spray of thorny, woody, tangled green and red and purple and pink and yellow fragile things hidden, crushed, under their pillows, under their dreaming heads.

Her mother kisses Dani’s forehead and leaves her tucked in lavender darkness, covers drawn to her chin even in summer because it’s always so much cooler upstairs. Sparkling purple and rainbowed sheets, a collection of bright Venetian carnival masks staring over her princess white desk, a giant snowball of a teddy bear she’s had since she was three slumped in front of her closet’s accordion doors. She has a little girl’s room, she suddenly thinks, with as-sudden disgust. Like Terri.

Dani twists onto her side, twisting on her insides, too, as her thoughts flatten into circles of wildflowers and practical magic and indifferent boys and how dangerous it probably was to hunt around the jogging trail, even if only mosquito bites happened. She knows better than that. Terri knows better than that.

Leave nine different wildflowers under your pillow and you will dream of your true love. They know better than _that,_ too. Neither she nor Terri really believe it, and the window of childhood when Dani _could_ believe it is closing fast, faster than she knows. Her pajama top might catch as it slams shut. 

Still, as the plates of her invisible chrysalis press and pinch, feeling guilty and irritable and self-loathing, Dani _wishes._ She’s wished before, on stars and birthday candles and chicken bones. Everyone has. But those wishes never came true, anymore than wildflowers bundled and mashed under a pillow can make her true love appear. Unless.

What girls magazines don’t say and fairytales only imply.

That the wishes that _really_ come true are not funded by deserving or will or even need. Although she is and she has and she does, all of those.

Chords pluck sharp in Dani’s heart as her consciousness darkens and closes down around the true last, essential detail. The magic.

_Despair into belief._

Dani’s eyelids flutter closed as she drifts under her own, unwitting spell. 

It’s a lake. 

She should have no idea on _this_ side of her eyelids of where she really is, though the suspicion still licks at her, gauzily. She kneels at the lake’s edge, nonsensically wondering where Terri is, and casts her eye over slim, speckled trunks that enclose this retreat like a movie set, intervals as regular as the teeth of a comb, bark yellow-white as the tartared teeth of a beast.

The lake is cloudy like bathwater and apple peel pink, tiny white and yellow petals skating its placid surface. Magical. When she dips her bare feet in, it is like she is painting her toenails with pink lemonade. Or, even better, she imagines that the cool, rose-colored water lapping at her ankles will harden into Fairy Godmother slippers as she withdraws them -- real dancing shoes, not like the pinching leather flats they make her wear for ballet and gymnastics, pale pink until she’s danced them creased and dingy -- but glass shoes with a heel and an arch that will still only lift her height to her prince’s shoulder, because princes are always uncommonly tall. Shoes that only a princess can fit, only a princess can wear, and definitely only a princess can dance in. If she were awake, Dani might eschew these fantasies for being _too_ childish, but she’s not awake, and they’re not actually childish at all.

She doesn’t notice the boy at first. Her awareness of him just grows until he takes up his own space. Finding him there, cloud watching a turquoise sky, is like looking up from two hours of understanding that it is getting dark to see, finally, that it is no longer getting. It is dark. 

It is not dark on the pink lake, but she _is_ there with a boy.

The boy, like the very tallest boys in her class, is closing on the height of a man -- not his own full height maybe, but someone’s -- although there’s no breadth to him yet. He is all bone and lean muscle under warm, sun-golden skin. Unlike anyone she’s ever known, he’s wearing all white, all white in the _grass,_ but his air of unbothered comfort covers him like a rain slicker, and she sees, too, that his crisp white things are pushed and rolled and unbuttoned as much off him as possible. 

Like the tallest boys she knows, too, he is made of acute angles. His spider-long legs crossed look like a geometry problem. His knees jut out at either side like bone wings, the exposed skin of his calves spread with fine hair that gleams, much like Dani herself would have if she hadn’t recently begun shaving it off. 

But those are the unremarkable things, or the least remarkable things, about him. His body _is_ interesting to her. He may not have powerful shoulders or thick arms, but there is something about the pent-up, elastic energy of his height and the dignity of his strange poise that stirs something. She would judge, after some coaxing or goading, that he is _cute._ But that isn’t what he is or really what she means.

What is remarkable, the first things she sees, and so the last things she would describe, are all above his narrow shoulders and the unbuttoned hollow of his throat. 

First, there’s his hair: it ripples in sunny brown waves all the way down to his shoulders, as long as Dani’s own fine, dark blonde hair, but fuller and -- possibly -- more beautiful. Dani has never seen a real boy her own age with long hair before, only on TV and in storybooks of old and imaginary days. It is against dress codes; it is against certain persistent ideas of what boys _should_ look like. But then, she’d never mistake him for a girl. There’s nothing at all girlish about him.

But then there is the mask.

The mask is also a kind of crown. That’s all she thought it was at first: dark green ivy filigree spread over a tightly-bound sapling branch that sits like a circlet just above his temples. In his near profile, she can still see how handsome he is -- his clever eyes, his symmetry, his soft cupid’s bow lips and milk clear skin -- but the other side of his face crawls with more ivy and vine filigree, knit together into a half mask that twines to join the crown on his high, princely brow. As he turns toward her, the more he is revealed, the more he is concealed.

Her awareness of him dawned slowly, but his notice of her arrives between them like a thunderclap. When he looks at her, it is like he has just woken up into a terrible shock. And yet, the mouth below his mask breaks its surprise into a grin. He whispers something, but not to her.

“Excuse me?” she asks. “Who are you?” And then, because she remembers being scolded by her parents for answering the phone that way once -- “That’s rude, Dani!” -- she softens, introducing herself as he blinks, something about the way his smile spreads reminding her of opening eyes. “Um, hi. I’m Dani. What’s your name?” 

“Hallå? English?” He cocks his head, nonplussed. “You're speaking English?”

He has an accent she’s never heard before; it makes her self-conscious. She’s never met a boy from _somewhere else._ “Yes. Yes, I’m…”

The boy’s confusion drags his delight inside. “You’re English?”

“I’m not. I’m -- I’m from Minnesota. I’m American.”

He stares, and Dani realizes both that she thought she _was_ dreaming, but also that she _isn’t._ Or at least, not _only_ dreaming.

The boy unfolds from his sitting and scoots closer to her, noticing her bare feet dangling in the water. He glances up at her with a small, shy smile, removing homemade-looking yellow loafers to imitate her. A butterfly swarm bursts under her ribs. He _is_ cute. But the mask bothers her.

_Who are you?_

Now that he’s so near, Dani wonders if maybe he’s not a little older. A ghost of light facial hair follows his jawline, a darker patch on his chin and under the shadow of his pale pink lip.

“Dani. Dani.” It is as though he is trying to memorize her name, to memorize her, pale blue eyes intense, though all the time, he lazily draws patterns in the water alongside her.

“You still haven’t told me who you are.”

That makes him pause. His eyes flick up and take hers. He’s so composed and reflective, but Dani thinks -- _This is it. This is actually it. This is my first kiss. He’s kissing me now._

“I’m sorry. Dani. My name’s Pelle,” he says, his tender voice rasping a little, as though his throat is just out of the package, untuned. “I think these are for you.” 

From behind his back, he produces, as if by parlor magic from his shirt sleeve, a bouquet, except a magic bouquet would be fuller and brighter. What he offers her is neither cultivated nor plastic, but fragile, wild, _found,_ a motley of waxy petals and coxcombs and variegated mandalas, all imperfect and as visibly mortal as Terri's half-crushed dandelions, although he has at least been careful.

Dani accepts his gathering, a little goosebump chill zinging from her fingers grazing his. She pauses to look, to count. Nine. Nine different kinds. “Thank you.” Pelle smiles sweetly and deflects back to the ground and the lake. But not for long. This is a boy who already knows how to look a girl in the eye.

Her mother has blue eyes, but they’re dark enough that as close as the foot of Dani’s bed or looking back at Dani and her sister in the backseat from the driver’s seat, you can’t be sure of the color. Terri’s eyes are like that, too. But this boy’s eyes are all light on the inside, pale and bright, so light you will always be able to see the pupil, and now the pupil of his eye memorizing her is fat and wide and acquisitive. 

“Pelle,” she repeats. Like his long hair, that second, softening syllable should make him more girlish, but it does the opposite. It feels like a magic word. “Pelle.”

“Yes,” he says. “I _am_ sorry. I didn’t know -- You’re _really_ here. American and…” he swallows, but braves up brightly, “so beautiful…”

She can see the red traveling up his throat, a fire set to consume those woody stems and cool green vines. But Dani can’t think past her own blush. No one has ever called her _beautiful_ before, no one except her parents and grandparents and, of course, they don’t count.

“I’m not beautiful.” She would never say that if she were awake, and she’s shocked herself, like she told him her deepest secret.

She’s shocked him, too. He’s almost offended. “You _are._ You absolutely are.”

“You --” She stops herself. A compliment for a compliment; it’s polite. But suddenly she feels maybe she _hasn’t_ told him her deepest secret. “I like your hair.”

“Oh?” He swoops a hand through it over his ear, neatly avoiding the crown, and that, Dani thinks, is a little like a girl. But she still likes it. 

“What is this?” she asks. She doesn’t touch the mask.

He follows her gaze, putting his hand to his face, smoothing the mask at his cheekbone as though he had forgotten. He leans and looks into his reflection in the water, then glances back to her thoughtfully. 

“What?” She laughs a little, defensively.

“It’s…” The cupid's bow presses into a frustrated frown. “I don’t think I know the right words yet.”

Dani’s hand comes up automatically as he faces her. Her fingers want its edge, can almost feel its smooth and pliant yield under her fingertips. A crown and half mask made of living plants and a branch so tender it probably bleeds white jelly sap. It is beautiful, but bizarre. “Can you take it off?”

The blue eyes blink at her in all earnestness, his fingers ghosting, holding the mask that holds his face. “No, I don’t think so. But...” 

He leans over and takes her hand in his, the bouquet he gave her kept loosely between them. His skin is rougher than she expected, like her grandfather’s almost, with all of his calluses from carpentry, and he smells like sunlight and uncut grass on a warm day. She feels like he’s from the country. Maybe that’s where he gets his frankness, too, because this _is_ a boy who knows how to look a girl in the eye, and he does. Before she can react, he presses a courtly kiss to her cheek, washing her in an electric flush. The mask scrapes her skin gently, like she passed accidentally close to an overgrown tree.

The kiss itself is a promise. His breath spells it against her freckled cheek. _“You_ will...

_Jag lovar.”_

The dream breaks on a sharp pain in her lower back and abdomen Dani has never felt before. She runs to the bathroom, and that will send her to her mother’s side of her parents’ bed in the blue morning light. And that is when twelve-year-old Dani, tucked back into neon bedclothes she newly despises for being too like a child’s, a hot water bottle clasped to the clanging pelvic pain radiating through to the small of her back, learns something new.

“Congratulations, sweetheart.” Her mother sighs a weary, proud, sympathetic smile, petting Dani’s forehead. “You are a woman now. Poor baby.”

Dani sleeps late past breakfast, and Terri attends her bedside as soon as she can sneak past their mom, morbidly curious on at least two levels. The pain is bad, and Dani is grey with it, only waking to take more ibuprofen, apply more heat. A parade of romantic comedies plays sotto voce, all but ignored on her bedroom TV.

“I guess you didn’t have a dream either,” Terri says, picking a broken purple coxcomb from the floor where it fell.

Dani curls around the hot water bottle, shiny with sweat, one eye cracked open. “I don’t remember,” she groans. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” 

Dani’s head rolls on her pillow. She wants to take a baseball bat and crack every carnival mask hanging on her bedroom wall, throw the big bear down the stairs. “No,” she huffs. “No, I didn’t. _Terri. Leave me alone.”_

She knows she dreamt something, but it’s all blurred, washed under the glassy surface of the pain and white cotton drifts of more sleep. She doesn’t feel well until dinnertime, when she takes a long, hot bath while her mother changes her sheets, shaking out and discarding the smashed wildflowers under her pillow without comment. Terri moves on, fascinated with Dani’s new condition. Shining clean, washed in pink apple bubble bath, Dani has all but forgotten.

Of course, Dani is not herself forgotten.

* * *

Dani’s first real kiss comes with a mistletoe prompt, in the cinnamon sugar days before Christmas vacation. Max from Model U.N. He's blond and high-achieving and confident, and sparks fly as they represent the Russian Federation together, pushing back against the pervasive, smothering encirclement of the NATO countries. Yet even as it is happening, as handsome and smart as Max is, as happy as she knows she ought to be, she feels like she is playing a part in being his girlfriend. Like she is simply _practicing._

She practices with Max for a few months, and they drift naturally away from each other over summer break. For a while, she starts sleeping more and her father worries. “It’s her age,” her mother assures him.

She's not wrong.

* * *

"Can I sleep with you?"

They’re thirteen and eleven, and the question is academic. Dani wakes up to Terri already in her bed, knees banging Dani’s knees, burrowing into her covers. "What?"

"Can I sleep with --"

"What's wrong?" The whites of Terri's eyes are moons. Dani rubs sleep-stung eyes and yawns, realizing with a groan. "It's that stupid movie. Oh, Terri --"

_"Please?"_

"Fine." Dani yields to the inevitable, scooting aside to let her sister take half the bed. With a whispered cry of relief, vows of love, of fealty, of undying debt, Dani's little sister wraps herself into Dani's twin. But in the morning, she will have questions.

"What does pella mean?" Terri asks, still a huddled lump under Dani’s covers. Dani is combing the closet for an outfit.

Dani has no context. She matches denim with a navy peasant blouse in the full-length mirror, unsure. “Don’t know. Why?”

“You kept saying it in your sleep. _Pellapellapella._ ”

Dani pulls a face, but Terri is adamant, excited to know something all of her own. "I would have woken you up,” she says, “but it's dangerous to wake someone talking in their sleep."

"That's sleepwalkers. And I'm not sure that’s even true."

"You seemed like you were talking to someone. You were being --” Terri’s nose wrinkles. “Weird. I thought maybe pella was French or something. It kind of sounds like something from ballet."

Terri dropped out of ballet years ago, but mom still drags her to Dani’s recitals, and she's right. It does have that kind of ring. It _feels_ familiar. "Weird how?"

Their mom’s voice slings up the stairs with the force of a battering ram. "Girls, you're going to be _late._ Move it. Food. Faces. Now."

It’s not until they're strapped into the backseat of their dad's burgundy Corolla on the way to Vacation Bible School that Terri remembers. Harsh words about how disrespectful it is to be late die down; the sisters chorus sulky apologies. And Terri suddenly goes rigid.

"Oh, you _did_ say something else."

Dani's face drains with sudden dread. "What?"

"It was creepy. I don't know how I forgot."

"What?" Dani notches her voice lower. Dad's curious hazel eyes flick back at them in the rearview mirror. She feels like interrogating a witness against a clock in a movie, and if Dad figures out what they're talking about, the good guys lose.

"You said,” Terri meets Dani’s eyes for maximum dramatic effect. “‘Why doesn’t it come off?'”

Later, Dani finds out that Pella is both a city in Iowa and ancient Greece, and it’s also the name of a European makeup company. She stares out of her bedroom window, frustrated, until the trees outside begin to warp and swim.

* * *

“It’s a rune,” he tells her, shows her. His arm circling her waist, one long-fingered hand loosely holds her wrist, and the other turns the teardrop-shaped stone over and over, just above her chest. The groove carved into the rock’s white face looks to Dani a little like an upside-down checkmark, a slightly crooked upside-down L.

They’re walking in the woods, or they were, or they will be. Dani blinked under her veil of sleep, and she was in his arms, as he pauses them under the canopy’s rustling shadows to show her something magic.

Dani is sixteen as she lies, sweetly paralyzed, under a blue comforter, riding low, slow delta brainwaves on the other side of her eyelids. Pelle is seventeen. His hair is shorter, but still long; his beard is more intentional than not; his reedy full height is nearly fulfilled. Even without the crown and the mask, he would belong in these woods, but he has them. He always has the crown and the mask, and so, heir apparent to everything wild and green, the woods belong _to_ him. 

“Laguz.” His accent has smoothed out over time, but he’ll never entirely lose it. His voice has smoothed out, too, glimpsing her with warmth like all the fur and feathers hidden in the watchful boughs of the woods around them. “It means lake, but it has power over dreams. And memory.”

“I never remember,” she realizes, blinking up at him through a surge of deja vu. When they are together this way, she knows everything, but she cannot take it through the door of waking. If only she could leave a note for herself. If only she could strew breadcrumbs -- no, the breadcrumbs would be eaten. If only she could strew _flower petals_ back to him, here...

“Shh, you will remember,” He kisses her cheek, an easy, assumed intimacy now. “Anyway,” he strokes the rune with his thumb, sending a sympathetic shiver into Dani’s belly, or what she still thinks of as her belly. “I’ll remember for both of us.”

“How?”

"Laguz." A smile hovers on his lips; resolution sharpens in his eyes. “And soon, too, I’ll be old enough to leave,” he replies.

“What does that mean?”

Smoothly, he slides the rune away without breaking eye contact, turning her in his arms. Thin and taut as he is, he feels heavy; he feels _powerful,_ and virginal as she is, Dani senses he could break her in ways she would want to be broken. 

The kiss that she wants is waiting on him and she leans into it to find it is only the first knot on a ribbon of his soft voice. With every word, he presses a kiss; with every word, his promises shed a skin of diffidence, becoming rougher, wetter. Possessive. “I’m coming for you, Dani. You will remember everything. You will _see_ everything. I _promise._ I am coming for you.”

* * *

Like most people, Dani rarely remembers her dreams, but, again like most people, she hardly remembers her life either, passing through it like a busy train station. Becoming, preparing, learning. Sometimes she thinks of nature documentaries where animals learn to stalk and kill and survive in their first keen months or else. Dani, dug deep in a seed bed of computer screens and retail labels and milestones measured in Scantron tests, feels more like an orchid kept in a closet full of fluorescent light, waiting for what food and water and natural radiation may come. 

She absorbs, follows, thrives as best she can, but it is wrong somehow. She can’t articulate it, but she _knows_ it is wrong. This isn’t her soil; this isn’t her light. But knowing something is wrong is no excuse for acting like it is wrong, and her vigilance gets diagnosed. Generalized anxiety. But it’s hard even to claim that for herself, watching her little sister’s leaves turn sullen and black. Dani knows she’s the lucky one. 

* * *

He's up to his pectoral muscles in the lake, a calm blue glass that would have him floating chest deep in the sky. When you have eyes that blue, she thinks, you don't have to wear clothes to make them stand out, the way that she does with gold eyeshadow or green sweaters. Just go outside on a clear day.

“Come in,” he greets her, waving. Dani hesitates where the bank of the lake crumbles to sandstone and rock. She’s gone swimming in freshwater lakes before, but she doesn’t have a swimsuit. Below the lake’s dancing surface, as he makes foamy rings with his broad strokes, she wonders if he has a swimsuit.

Of course he has his crown and his mask.

“Don’t be shy,” he scolds her fondly, reading her body, reading her thoughts. 

She reflects his playfulness, pulling her blouse over her head as a flag of surrender. Her breasts bounce with the motion in her thin bra, magnifying the passing friction of undressing, and his smile fades into quiet, gratifying attention. Biting her lip, she shrugs out of her shorts, self-consciously brisk, and sits down, letting her legs play with the cool, yielding weight of the water.

“Do you need help?” He’s bright and teasing, but not teasing, and Dani twists coquettishly in anticipation of finding new depths with him. They have more than kissed. He has tracked kisses as far south as her breasts, lingered on the red nipples that knot now as much for the memory as the crisp lake air; more, since the memory is more real than the air. Even when she forgets this, as now, at the bottom of the lake, she knows it. The subtle ripple in the water is the ripple of her brain waves, low and slow and bringing him closer. 

Wherever they are, she has never been this bare with him.

“I leave on pilgrimage soon,” he says, treading water toward her. Crystalline droplets jewel him in sunshine all over his shoulders, his hair, his crown, but his love shines brighter.

“Oh, yeah? So...”

“I’ll be able to come to where you are.” Closer. The water recedes as he nears, down to his stomach. To his waist. There’s a light stripe of hair there, dark and wet, and she knows what else she sees. Her unguarded breath falls out of her. 

“Not as soon as I want,” he says, “But I will find you. Find you and...” He loses his own breath to a smile. Dani lightly kicks water at him, making him sputter and grin, wiping a glitter of sunlight from his eyes.

He might be circumspect in other ways, but he’s easy with his nakedness, rising further and showing her how hard he is, how much of a man she has in him. “Come in?”

“How about…” She can’t just _give in_ , even if it’s all she wants. She must honor the instinctive pull to his push. “I’ll come in if you take off your mask?”

He smiles and scoffs. “I can’t do that. Although…”

“Yes?”

“Maybe if you come in, _you_ can do it?” He cocks his head. “Maybe if you come _in,_ you’ll _see.”_

Her sex tightens around its own pulse, something that both hurts and feels good. She knows what it is to make herself come -- she can only do it with furtive thrusts against her body pillow in shameful, door-locked darkness, but she _has_ done it -- but that kind of arousal never felt as crucial as this. 

Water bobs around the purpling head of his thick cock, and she can't look, but she can't look away. His desire that she see his desire, that she take it as a natural fact, thrums between her breasts, between her legs.

A need to meet his boldness with her own screws her even tighter. “I do want to see you, Pelle.”

Delight stills on him, playfulness hardening into unmistakable want. “Then come." 

He falls back in and swims up to the lake’s edge, looking boldly up between her legs, and as she stares down at him, she can’t move. His head is right _there._ Closer, he clambers up to the side, claiming her with one elegant, callused palm on her thigh. Her lips part soundlessly, frozen, as without hesitation, he noses into her like an animal, pushing against the cotton panel of her panties, dragging it aside, hungry for her scent and her sounds, ravenous for her taste. She grabs his head, as much to steady herself as anything, and growling, he applies himself that much more.

"I'm coming for you," he murmurs into her sex. "I promise. Now you come for me.”

She shrieks as he drags her by her legs into the lake, which is cool and warm all at the same time, between the water and his mouth, between the air on her skin and his skin on her skin. Weightless, she falls with him, exhilarated and kicking with his hands on her hips as a guide, swum quickly back out to a depth where she will never touch bottom.

She inclines into the thrill of _wanting_ this, hooking arms and legs around him. His body is hard, hard bones and angles and what, with spiky fascination she realizes is his sex, a rail against her thigh and meant for her, so full of blood it could hurt her. When he discards his cloak of gentleness, there is so little soft about him really, but when he discards the cloak of gentleness, there’s so little soft she _wants._

His thumbs graze her collarbone and fall down to her breasts through a sopping, diaphanous bra as she presses against him. The beating heart in her sex makes her grind into him, so that they both muffle cries into each other’s mouths. She tastes herself on his lips. Fascinated, she tastes again. Sweet and sharp, she doesn’t blame him for wanting it, and now she only wants to try him.

He boosts her up so that she locks her legs around his waist, as he bends his head to her chest. She rips her bra off herself, and he laughs, thanking her. He knows to plump, to lick the nipple before he teases it with his teeth, before he bites. He also knows to bite. Hissing, she feeds her breast to him, astonished at how good it feels, and even the alien wet of his mask on her skin is not so alien that it doesn’t provoke her closer to what they both want.

His fingers find her sex and gently, firmly pet, stroke, toy, and she opens for him like she has never opened, has never suspected she could. She senses -- no, she _knows_ from almost twenty years of living that it should not be so easy for her to feel so good, and yet she won't have the option of being taken cold and rote. As if in answer, he finds the spot that makes her shiver and all the blood in her rushes there to meet him.

"Dani, will you come for me?” He plucks her bowstring, and she shudders, pulled so taut. She's riding into him, pressing her virgin sex against that hard core that wants her so badly, it hardly feels like flesh on her flesh. He groans around her red, happily abused nipple, but also stroking the nerve bundle she herself has never found, playing it with a rhythm she can’t help but accompany.

"You're --" _Yes. I'm coming._ _This is what it feels like._ She has glimpsed the horizon rushing at her so fast and thought she was satisfied, but she never knew how much further into this sky she might go.

"I will find you," he whispers. His breath rakes her; he is drinking her arousal like a plant slaking itself with sunlight, and he keeps finding the music in her. She could _swear,_ in the half second before her brain fills with lightning and white skies, his mask disappears, his crown, too, but she has no time to look again or to question. Her scream breaks the skin of the dream.

Her sex is still shuddering as she wakes, breathing hard, unsure what happened, certain what happened. She knows she dreamt _something_. Can girls have wet dreams? 

She touches herself through her pajama shorts, or she means to, but as her fingers graze the seam of her sex, her nerves gasp. Dani draws back into a surprised murmur. She’s still too swollen, her sex too shocked.

* * *

Three months later, 18-year-old Dani will lose her virginity, technically, to Matt. He was just a friend she thought, but as the weeks close on summer -- the last before heading off to college, so much to do, so _much,_ and the strange expectation she will have sex is there, too, though no one says it -- he has grown more interesting to her in that way. He will penetrate her vagina, and he will come. And then her virginity, somehow, will be over.

She’ll have gone to his house for his birthday party and she will stay late; they will be unsupervised; he will crush her into his bedroom door. Semen leaking down her leg on the toilet, Dani will be fascinated more than panicked because she’s been on birth control to manage PMS symptoms since she turned fifteen anyway, but any attraction to him will cool down as quickly as the fluid on her thigh to an abstract, something almost clinical. It’s not because he was a hasty, overwhelmed lover, or because Dani barely glimpses a good feeling until it’s already done. It’s just...not right.

As she shrugs into the cling of her t-shirt at the foot of his stripped bed, Matt tells her, “I’ll always be your first,” his tones triumphant and dreamy, but Dani’s smile is a wince. She can’t argue, but she doesn’t agree.

Most of high school, Dani thought of nothing but getting _out_ and starting a new life, a _real_ life, especially as the house shrank between her and Terri. Her sister’s mood swings weren’t just being a teenager; being covered in tubes and paramedics after eating half a bottle of their mom’s Ambien wasn’t just being a teenager. She loved -- loves, will always love -- Terri so much, but walking around her sister’s problems wasn’t like walking on broken glass; it was like walking in sticking mud, either stuck or sliding, trying to reach Terri but pulling out of her own shoes or spilling over herself anytime, every time she tried to move. Eventually, going away to college just seemed like the only useful thing she could do. 

College then takes Dani to New York, as much of a brand-new life as a girl from suburban Minnesota can ask for. It’s _far enough_ from home, home-for-Christmas far, but not home-every-other-weekend far. Her GPA gets her on the Dean’s List, but she has trouble opening up, starting new relationships, getting comfortable anywhere outside of class. She starts a diary, but gives it up after a few weeks when she realizes all of her entries, sooner or later, are about Terri. So she starts seeing a counselor instead. Meanwhile, Dani’s primary care doctor recommends a mild antidepressant to help increase Dani’s feelings of well-being and combat anxiety.

“It’s well tolerated,” the doctor says, maybe noting the crease of hesitance on Dani’s face. “We see the usual side effects with an SSRI -- weight gain sometimes, sometimes a decrease in libido. We’ll start with a low dose and see how you respond.”

Dani nods, ever the cooperative patient. But the doctor isn't finished.

“This particular one, too,” she adds, “patients sometimes report changes in sleep patterns. Sometimes increasing the dosage actually helps with that, so be sure to call with any problems. We can take care of it right away.”

* * *

Dani has a little mental breakdown of her own while home on winter break -- just stress, midterms, it’s fine, she tells herself -- but no one notices because Terri is also home. For the first time in months, too, she forgets her anxiety medication. Housebound with a cold, she’ll have to wait for her dad to pick up a refill from the local pharmacy.

Sniffling, not allowing herself the release of self-pity, she tries not to gag on 30 milliliters of syrupy medicine that tastes like it could clean clogged drains and crawls, defeated, into her old bed in her old room. Its girlishness, what survived the purge of her teenage years, no longer alienates her; now that she has attained womanhood, its plush, particolored nest comforts her. She cozies under an old, old rainbow comforter she had forgotten, turns on her side and tours the Venetian masquerade masks that still stare, eyeless, from her wall. She looked down on them once, but there’s an odd pleasure to come home to them now. They’ve watched over her all her life. If masks could talk.

The upstairs room is not so far above it all she can't hear her mother rattling pans, closing cupboards downstairs, restless with her emptying nest suddenly full, but that’s also subtly hypnotic in daytime darkness. Dani's eyelids drift down.

And it’s a dance.

It’s a dance, but not like any she’s ever seen. She’s not gliding on the glossed mahogany parquet of a ballroom, but barefoot walking an inch of hazel rainwater in something more like a barn, or maybe a strange rural church. Every wall is covered, _covered,_ with cryptic, garish designs and tableaus: babies carried through fires, women opening their palms with daggers, men and women displayed in almost didactic images of sexual congress. If it is a church, it venerates the coarsest and rudest aspects of human life. And yet as she twirls, fascinated, tracking ripples around the room, she appreciates that for all the crudity on display, without judgment, there can only be innocence. 

Swishing a white linen bell skirt and splashing rings with every bare step, Dani begins to feel herself more and more innocent.

The music that will move her, that is moving faceless, white-clothed figures behind flower crowns and leaf-strewn masks all around her, whines on flutes and accordions. It is the discordant waltz of a lost soul coming home. Through dusty windows peering in at the dance, lanterns rock gleaming orange tongues of light from bare black branches, adding their rattling rhythm to her feet.

Her awareness of him arrives like a thunderclap, and she sees that he has been waiting. “Pelle.” She has no sense of time passing, but why, why does it feel so sharp in her chest to see him now?

Hands folded behind his back, his lips quirk into a gentle smile. His wavy hair is a tousled mess, but that’s how she likes it best, a little wild, looking before like she’d like to leave it after. His full height, his full breadth eclipses her in his shadow, and she sees he’s barefoot, too, wearing familiar white linen. She always asks about the mask, if not the crown, but one day she will remember to ask why he always wears white.

This is the man he would always be. This is the man of her dreams, and something about this time is special because she’s lucid enough to recognize it. And not only that.

“This is…” The end of the sentence is a precipice; she can’t see to the bottom.

“Different,” he finishes, taking her into his body, then letting her out into the first position of their waltz. “Yes.” He indicates everything around them, past them. “I’m on pilgrimage, and so I’m dreaming about home.” His voice thickens. “That includes you, too, you know.”

 _“You’re_ dreaming?” She falls into rhythm with him as he dances her lightly, slowly, so easily. 

“We both are. Dani, I miss you. It’s harder to find you lately.” His eyes briefly darken, sharpening her heart again. “But I will find you in the flesh soon. That is...” He hesitates, elapses a box step before he can say it. “You do still want me?”

"Oh, Pelle." How can he ask such a thing? “I will never want anyone else. How could I?”

“Good.” And he looks -- her heart thrills, her heart breaks -- relieved. “I know you don’t remember when you’re awake…But I wondered why you dream of me less.” Step and step and step and step, the bright circles they splash up cross a slow, deep wave through the water at their feet.

 _Ah. The medication._ And she will not remember when she wakes up. 

“What is it?” he asks.

“I think it might be...something I’m taking for stress.”

“Ah.” His relief shades with sadness for her and, maybe, a little helplessness. His jaw sets beneath his natural poise, his gentleness.

They settle into a rhythm; she settles into his warmth. Still, she must ask herself. Why does this feel so much _more?_ How long has it been?

“I love you,” she offers. He gleams. “I love you, too.”

One hand spreads her lower back and the other folds hers to his shoulder, and she rests her head on his chest, reading the rune stitched in royal blue just below his anatomical heart. His body is so solid, so sure, and she fits it perfectly, a key and a lock, turning, turning, just like the dance, as he reels her among the blonde smiles of masked strangers who still feel vaguely familiar. He smells like the woods, earthy even apart from his ivy crown and mask -- although certainly that scent finds her, too, bittersweet and green. But breathing him in takes his skylit calm into her lungs, into her blood. Very soon, her body brims red and warm and wet, as she molds her arousal against his. Step and step and step and step. She tips her face up into a kiss that is another lingering waltz.

They dance for a long time before Dani realizes the music, even the rattle of the wind in the lanterns in the trees, follows his heartbeat, an instinctual, visceral harmony. In her own time, which is his own time, she caresses his throat, his face. She punctuates with soft, doe-eyed love bites.

The mask, the crown, cloying and green. She caresses them, too. Every part of him and still living. And yet, she wishes, just once...

“Dani,” He quickens slightly as her nail finds the edge of the mask. “What are you doing?”

She works her finger along the edge. She can feel the warmth of the flesh underneath. If he were burned, disfigured, even a naked skull, she would love him no less, but she does at least want to _know._ “Please, Pelle, I’ve never seen --”

She feels the prickle of his beard, the warmth of his skin, and the very slight pulse of the vines against the heartbeat in the pads of her fingertips.

“Dani, it’s not what you think --” 

She works her finger underneath with the pretense of a caress, but he is always a little quicker, it seems. A sharp sound to go with a sharp cuff of her wrist. For the first time, she feels his height, the breadth of his hands, his long fingers as something dangerous, as something that could overcome her whether she wanted him to or not. Which, perversely, stirs a wish that he might go against her wishes. Vibrating with adrenalin, Dani is all arousal; what he will do is what she wants done.

But he isn’t like that, he would never be, and she blinks back the astonishing thought she has somehow _hurt_ him. “I’m sorry,” he says. Gentleness drifts from him like an errant leaf torn from his mask, his heartbeat hammering behind his eyes. “It’s not that I’m wearing a mask, it’s --”

“ _I’m_ sorry. But I don’t understand. Why are you hiding from me? I would take anything --”

"Please _listen_.” He traps her face in his hands. "Älskling, I tell you, you’re the only one I can hide nothing from, and this mask, though you don’t understand it, is _proof.”_

For a moment, she’s confused, and then she blinks up, the crinkle of a white paper bag from the pharmacy dropped in her face. “Dani,” Terri says, “Hey, wake up. Dad got your meds.”

* * *

Dani decides to stay in New York after she gets her B.A. Terri is having a hard time and will be going back to the community college in Rochester until she finishes her Associates degree, and then she’ll transfer; Dani knows there will be less pressure on Terri if she’s _not_ there. Less pressure on her, too, she supposes. They message less than they used to, but Dani tries to make sure they talk on the phone at least once a week. She _tries._

She picks up a summer seminar toward her M.A., gets a job working as a tutor for an SAT prep program, and begins earnestly roughing out a life for herself, just for herself. She crosses paths with her roommate’s ex Christian a few times, but they don’t go on their first date, coffee, until July. By August, they are seeing each other regularly. By October, Christian is openly calling her his girlfriend. When she finally moves out on her own for spring semester, a little disappointed Christian didn’t want to get a place with her, he will still sleep at Dani’s apartment at least twice a week. 

Christian is tall, broad, bearded, and blue-eyed, and when they begin spending time together, she feels like he might be someone she’s been looking for all her life. From the first, he just fit her so well. She doesn’t care that his family has money, but their stability naturally, effortlessly extends to her, and being with him steadies Dani like a dose of medicine. Being with him steadies Dani like doing well in a required course. She would have married him after the first year whether it was a good idea or not, but there’s no danger of that. After three years, he’s still renewing his leases with Mark. They do have a lot of fun, especially that first year, and Dani thinks, more than once, _this must be what I’ve been waiting for._ And she is willing to wait for it.

What bothers her is the creeping awareness that Christian is secretly waiting for something himself; that being with her makes _him_ feel like he’s taken a dose of medicine; that being with her makes _him_ feel like he’s doing well in a required course. 

He forgets anniversaries. He forgets birthdays. Shared plans over breaks from school are always a major negotiation. More and more often, she’s sure his smiles are stamped on. More and more often, she catches his contentment in the light, his interest, even his arousal, and perceives the edges of a mask.

* * *

Dani rarely remembers her dreams. But she remembers those eyes.

"Dani, this is --" Christian casts to the other man, as if to be sure he gets it right. "Pelle? From Sweden."

"Pelle," Pelle repeats approvingly. "Dani. Nice to meet you."

She didn’t know she’d be meeting anyone, and when Christian mentioned that there was a new member of his study group, shaking the snow off his shoulders and accidentally onto her at the coffee shop door, she stiffened. Christian’s friends never outright rejected her, but they never welcomed her either, and she spent the whole morning psyching herself up to be with them in order to be with him. “Oh,” was all she said, as anxiety closed her throat under a brittle smile. But now her throat thickens for other, surprising reasons.

_Who are you?_

"Hi. Nice to meet you, too, Pelle." _Pelle._ Familiar on her lips. Where does she remember it from? And not only his name. It feels like a jinx to say it, but she has to ask. "This is going to sound...have we met before?"

Pelle’s smile fluoresces. "I don’t know. Have you ever been to Sweden?"

"No, nah, I don’t think so." She chuckles awkwardly. Of course she hasn’t. But the way he looks at her makes her doubt herself. _I know you._

He tries again. "Germany? England?" Dani shakes her head on each, and Pelle shrugs, but the teasing smile on his cupid’s bow lips is his true voice. That smile keeps her eyes when Christian announces he's grabbing coffee, and Dani lingers with him, though normally she would have gone with Christian. She sees Christian notice, but Pelle pulls her quickly back to her own question, and this time, his unmasked answer.

“Perhaps...Do you dance, Dani?”

Her lips tremble. She hears her molars clack. _I do know you._

Pelle leans close, eyes glittering, as if to confide a secret. His breath brushes her lips, a scent of sweet cardamom and cinnamon, layering on his own male scent, salt and flesh and sunlight filtered through green branches.

Dani blinks back a vivid image of an ivy crown and a mask on him, swallowing a gasp. _Pelle._

Her eyes flick back to Christian across the room, talking to the barista over the counter, pointing at the menu board.

“Christian…” There are rules though. Rules that say she should be in love with Christian, rules that insist wishes don’t come true. 

Pelle catches her as she staggers back, infinitely gentle, but this is also a man who knows how to look a woman in the eye.

He casts back behind them, a flaw of derision for Christian undisguised in his eyes. “Christian?” His voice is silkspun, but so are spiderwebs, and spiderwebs can be as strong as steel. Dani feels snared in that strength, now. 

No, not _snared._

She knows that cupid’s bow mouth, she knows those pale eyes flicking back to possess hers, she knows the hands drifting to her waist, to her back, to gather her as for a languid, drifting waltz. "Dani, do you feel held by him?”

_Held._

* * *

“Just a little stumble.” 

That’s how Pelle explains his arms around her to Christian, mild as milk as he conveys Dani to an overstuffed chair, and Dani is a little surprised how readily her boyfriend accepts it. She’s not even wearing a heel. But when Christian turns from her, she might spy the string around the back of his head that keeps that bland smile in place. 

The study group includes a few others, all Christian’s friends, and it dawns slowly on Dani she has been filling her life with Christian’s friends and Christian’s life, the same way she filled her diary with Terri’s problems. As it dawns slowly that of everyone else gathered, her only real friend is the man she just met.

Of course, they really _haven’t_ just met.

Pelle watches her over his laptop, passing her love notes in his looks, but she only knows because she’s watching him, too. Christian sits between them, but he’s not between them. Their little story began in a coffee shop and that’s how it’s ending, too, Dani thinks, chilling herself, but that chill only lasts as long as it takes to find Pelle’s eyes on her. By that measure, she may never be cold again.

Eventually, he asks her to look at a sentence, to let him know if it reads okay, sliding next to her on the chair that’s really too big for one, but only big enough for two if one is halfway on the other’s lap.

There, nested below a dry, academic explanation of the significance of Loki’s wife Sigyn shielding her husband from being blinded, a cursor blinks at the start of a sentence that doesn’t belong. Or rather, it does belong; it belongs to her.

_Do you see my face now?_

Her words are stuck; she sees her long, disturbed look at Pelle draw notice, not just from Christian. She nods, a nervous glance flitting back to Christian like an apology. He dismisses more than accepts it under a fleeting smile.

“My English sometimes is a little...off, I know.” Pelle pulls his laptop back from her, typing again, his hip unavoidable against her thigh. “Let me try it this way.” He passes it back.

_Do you see all their masks?_

Composure, disinterest, preoccupation, concentration, friendliness, blandness. Dani quietly tours faces. Not just Christian, studiously not looking at her so close to another man. Not just their group, all poured into their laptops, their tablets, their coffees. Pelle’s is the only honest face here, even as he speaks to her this way, in deliberate secret. No sooner does that thought glance her, but he hits the escape key, and her reflection abruptly occupies all of his laptop’s black stare.

For a flicker, she thinks that her image is wearing a flower crown. Her smile is reflexive in her shock, a reflex to strain a pleasant face, even as she searches for something else.

_My mask._

But then, Pelle leans close, joining her reflection, and the smile he inspires is there for her to see, too. The others will still only think they’re looking at his paper, but she has finally seen the truth.

“Yeah,” Dani says slowly. “That’s much clearer.” They exchange looks. “Let me…” she says, and Dani discreetly adds her number and address to the bottom of his document. Pelle looks almost proud.

She’ll still leave the coffee shop with Christian, but after a long talk that ends with Christian’s eyes hard and red in the drifting snow, she’ll also leave Christian with the coffee shop.

He never said when he was coming, he hasn’t called, but every promise since childhood’s threshold lights a torch on a path for him. She can almost see it flare up the sidewalk, up the stairs, all the way to her door. She should strew flower petals; at least, someone should. Expectation frets her, but this expectation is anxiety’s good twin, giddy and joyous, drawing her up instead of breaking her down. She changes into the flowing ivory panels of a Grecian dress, her favorite, her most flattering. With bare shoulders and a high thigh slit, the snow drifts down on the wrong solstice for it, but she's unbothered. They will stay inside and make their own summer.

When she hears the knock, her heart squeezes like a fist and she has never before been so slick, so quickly. Not while she was awake.

The lock turns, the door opens under slow-motion dream fingers, and when it is wide, he fills it, a thick, navy wool coat draped over his own dressing for summer, all blue embroidered white linen and admiration that is, for the moment, tamed to self-effacing boyishness. For a moment, it's their first meeting. The very first.

“Hi.” He clears his throat. “I think these are yours.”

From behind his back, he offers her flowers, a ragtag bouquet, nothing bought or cultivated or professionally arranged, but fragile, wild, _found,_ imperfect, and visibly mortal. And that is why it is perfect to wish on, and that is why she seizes them with a sharp, delighted cry on the way into his embrace. 

Her arm hooked around his neck, she closes her eyes, opens her eyes, breathes. 

“I’m so sorry it took so long, my --” Pelle exhales, but she shushes, wipes his regret away, her thumb on his jaw, her mouth on his mouth. The first time, the actual first time, and she has all of him, in the flesh.

She pulls him into the lavender darkness of her bedroom, and passing the threshold, for an odd instant, she is almost surprised it isn’t her room back in Minnesota. But there are no masks on these walls and no masks on each other either. No deception anywhere. She tore down every marker of Christian’s footholds in her life. What remains, aside from glimpses of her family, is an altar to her studies, only books and plants and more books, and she realizes in a flash, between his baring her breast and her finding his fasten for his pants, that all this time, she’s been preparing for him, too. Nothing could make her wetter for him but fingering the collar of this subliminal leash won’t hurt. She’s been summoning for this moment since the first time he kissed her and the first time she bled. 

He lifts her and drives her onto the soft, clean cushion of her comforter, humming her name, as she gropes, works the burning, slick length of him, the body she knows, is mapped to her fingertips, but she is overwhelmed to finally touch. Leaves of a lifetime of dreams she’s spent with him fall down as they strip each other with all the ferocity of a reunion and the urgency of a first time, and she knows, she _knows,_ this is the man of her dreams. He teases her panties down and licks her mewling clean of any illusion it could be otherwise.

His head in her lap, his hair covering her as she dissolves against him like a woman made of sand, her hands clutch soft handfuls of his long hair, brush and caress his bearded cheeks. No mask. No crown. And yet there is. He doesn’t have to wear it to possess it, something magic and uncanny, something you can only see in a dream.

He looks up from her, mouth wet and red with his attention, breathing her in, more than a little overwhelmed himself. 

“All the time, I was just seeing you the way...you _are._ ” she wonders aloud.

He hums agreement, pleased. He lifts himself over her, scraping words along kisses that thrill down to the root of her spine. “We have a destiny in common. You weren’t prepared for it like I was, and so...you saw without understanding. And then...I had trouble reaching you here.”

He exhales. “No more.” He tries her entrance with his fingers, gentle, curling caresses that close her eyes, her nerves still trembling from his teeth and his tongue. But he gives her time to catch up, playing, waiting. Eventually, she flickers up at him. “What destiny?”

He balances himself on his elbow, smiling down at her. Too easy, his expression winks. “This one,” he says softly, entering her slowly, carefully, riding against her as she lifts her hips and pushes and he knows she’s ready. 

When he knows she’s ready, he will break her exactly the way she has always wanted to be broken, and she will gasp into a horizon she’s only seen in dreams. And when he fills her, he will rasp her name like a prayer; he will call her his queen.

“You are, you know,” he says, turning onto her, his sweat sweet and salty between them. “You saw my crown and you saw my mask. But you have always worn a crown for me. I was born to find you, and you were born to be our queen.” His earnest reverence covers her in gooseflesh.

As she cools down, he lifts her and spears her, giggling, on his lap, cupping her face to show her the mirror of the dark bedroom window across from the bed. A sparkling blizzard drifts onto the glowing rime of iced rooftops behind all the black hollows of their reflection, and his eyes shine like twin stars as he threads his fingers through her hair, smiling kisses along her ear. Her image is soft and naked and uncrowned, legs folded around his back, but she can _feel_ his meaning, just as she can feel the winter outside beginning to warp and bend, as if in obeisance to them both.

**Author's Note:**

> My initial idea was that the masks would be a close analogue to the old story about the woman with the ribbon choker, and of course, her lover is obsessed with untying it...and that’s how you get a headless corpse in the honeymoon suite. But as I worked on it and thought more about Pelle and what I respond to about Pelle and how I like to look at Midsommar as more Dani’s liberation and wish-fulfillment, less brainwashing, I decided that the mask should be, counter to the way we normally see masks, a revelation of character.
> 
> That is to say that Dani, from the very first, though she cannot understand this, is seeing Pelle as the Green Man/May King he will one day be and always is. She perceives correctly, of course, when she is seeing all the artifice around her, particularly in her relationship with Christian and even within herself. Those are the real masks, the real maladaptive maskerad. And so there is a deliberate subversion once she meets Pelle in the real world: that is when he is wearing his mask, and that is also when she finally sees her own.
> 
> Also, I really just wanted to do the Labyrinth ballroom scene with Dani and Pelle. What.
> 
> If anyone wonders why Dani doesn’t really remember the dreams and Pelle does, you know homeboy is using the Laguz rune to remember, which Dani can’t. But it’s kind of the same reason Ron and Hermione can cast spells and Harry can’t when they arrive at Hogwarts. Background and training, people.
> 
> I do also want to add here that, as someone who has -- surprise! -- struggled with mental health issues, PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THIS AS AN ANTI-MEDICATION METAPHOR. Celexa is my girlfriend. Meds can work. LOTS OF THINGS can work. Taking charge of your own life and your own recovery -- what I would prefer to be the metaphor of this piece -- ultimately works best in my experience, but that can include any number of informed choices, including meds, life changes, exercise and diet programs, having lots of orgasms with a GGG pagan dream lover, whatevs.
> 
> This fic is very CANON WHATEVER, but if you would like to think of when this ends, what happens, Pelle finds Dani in the winter. Maybe inevitable something bad happens next, but this time, Dani has a partner and a support system to help her process it healthily(ish) and then lowkey helps her fiance Pelle lure some anthropologists to Midsommar, including her ridiculous ex-boyfriend trying to win her back, and becomes Hårgan in a happy, accepting way and not a traumatized-into-it way. I mean. Her destiny is to be May Queen.
> 
> Also, if you liked this, let me recommend with all my heart the beautiful and much more immersive "as certain dark things," which begins Dani and Pelle's love story through a different prism of shared dreams...It's seriously so gawjuss. <3<3<3


End file.
